Usually, dictionaries first come out
as a heavy tome and only then the best of them are converted into electronic
format. The story of the Lingvo family of dictionaries was exactly the
opposite. They first appeared electronically back in 1989, with the paper
version published only in 2007.

These dictionaries now have a
readership of over 30 million people. Overall, the company has issued 15
dictionaries in various Russian-foreign language pairs, including English,
German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Online versions of these
dictionaries are available in the dictionaries section of the Russian search
engine Yandex.

For those who are studying Russian or
can read Russian, this service offers only one language pair: English-Russian
and Russian-English. The other dictionaries available here are built around
English: English-German, English-French and so on.

At the same time, this dictionary has
a very useful function for those who are interested in understanding usage as
it provides textual examples for each entry. Professional translators know how
important a word's context is: Here various options are already in place to
choose from.

This is one more popular family of
electronic dictionaries, covering 13 languages, including English, German,
Spanish, French and Italian. Multitran is used by over 90,000 people on a daily
basis. However, the number of entries and their comprehensiveness are still
inferior to those offered by Lingvo.

Online
translation sites

There are several quite decent
services capable of translating whole chunks of text. The two most widely used
are: translate.google.com and translate.yandex.ru. Online translation sites
have not yet been trained to provide an accurate and nuanced translation, which
is why machine translation is often full of mistakes.

However, if you need to understand
the general subject matter or the gist of a text, they can be quite useful. But
a lot of additional human input is still required to do a quality translation
with the help of an online translation service.

Language
courses

There are quite a few Russian
language courses available online. The most accessible one for beginners is a
project launched by the TV channel RT, called Learn Russian, which starts with
the basics: the alphabet, phonetics, testing, and other basic functions.

The thing is that learning a foreign
language depends very much on individual learning styles, and different people
may find that different training courses work better for them.

Transliteration

Many of those who are learning
Russian or just use it from time to time have not yet installed a Russian
keyboard on their computers. For them there exists a specialist service,
translit.ru.

It has two important functions.
First, it allows you to type Russian text with the use of a phonetic keyboard.
Second, you can type your Russian text in Latin script and then automatically
convert it into Cyrillic.